


Luncheon - Frost Bite Deleted Scene

by Nyxelestia



Series: Winter Wolves DVD Extras [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Arguing, Catharsis, Consequences, Conversation, Deleted Scene, Derek is a Failwolf, Food, Gen, He Will Get Better Eventually, Hurt Stiles, In the Actual Fic of Included/Undeleted Scenes, Lunch, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pack Dynamics, Post-Season/Series 02, Revelation, The Hale Pack - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 00:29:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15545613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxelestia/pseuds/Nyxelestia
Summary: “Why don’t you boys get started filling us in?” Steve suggested, taking a seat on Melissa’s other side from Lydia on the sofa and reaching for the plates."Okay, so, um…” Stiles glanced between Steve and his father, taking the plate from Steve with his good hand. “Remember the night Laura Hale died? Out in the Nature Preserve?""Let me guess," John drawled. "Scottwasthere, and that was when he was bitten by a werewolf?"Stiles scowled at his father. "Do you want to hear the story or not?"Probably not.





	Luncheon - Frost Bite Deleted Scene

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be Chapter 8 of [Frost Bite](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4675508). I'll spare you my litany of reasons why it isn't, anymore. But I did still spend several _months_ working on this, and my original plan for the "Friends and Family" day of [Gen Fest](https://teenwolflegacy.tumblr.com/genfest) fell through, so I'm still sharing this with ya'll.

In the afternoon, Steve opened the door to see three aloof teenagers and a surly adult.

“Erica,” he greeted with an encouraging nod. “Boyd, Isaac, Hale — you’re all looking better.”

Steve had been right about Erica being the kind of girl to care a lot about her appearance. Her make-up could rival a magazine cover, and her blonde hair curled elaborately over her shoulders. Her white shirt, red jacket, and jeans skirt — which seemed awfully short even by 21st century standards — were worlds away from the wreckage of bloodied fabric and torn leather he’d found her in last night.

“Thanks, Captain!” Erica said cheerfully. “I dressed up for you!”

Next to her, Boyd also looked a lot better than last night, wearing plain jeans and a plainer shirt and holding a leather jacket over his shoulder. Under the bright afternoon sun, his dark skin didn’t bear a trace of the bruising or blood from last night. His expression was mostly long suffering as he quipped at Erica, “Could you _be_ any creepier?”

“How am I creepy?” Erica demanded. “We’re meeting _Captain America_ -”

“A grown-ass man who you ‘dressed up’ for-”

“Why don’t you come in?” Steve cut them off, stepping back and gesturing toward the living room.

Behind them, Isaac snickered as he pushed them both forward, his mop of blond curls almost bouncing as he followed them in.

Hale’s eyes looked like they were about to roll right out of his head as he followed them inside while they all toed off their shoes. Between the shapely stubble, piercing hazel gaze, and the fancy jeans, he looked like he’d stepped right off the cover of a cheesy romance novel.

The werewolves’ veneer of good cheer evaporated when they saw Lydia Martin, just as well-dressed and red hair in elaborate braids, sitting next to Melissa on the sofa in the living room. In the chairs next to the end of the sofa, the boys stilled in the middle of opening up all the food cartons on the coffee table.

“…Derek,” Scott greeted stiffly.

Hale didn’t even respond, just dropped into the couch, jaw clenched tight and gaze fixed on the stack of plates and forks in front of him.

“We brought Chinese?” Melissa tried, awkward smile twitching as she looked between Hale and her son.

The other three teenagers all joined Hale in tense silence, apparently unbothered by the tight fit.

John kept his side-long gaze on Hale as he reclaimed his easy chair. Scott’s hands shook as he went back to opening up various cartons of food — most of which Steve even recognized — and Stiles fiddled with his sling.

The afternoon sunlight reflected off the Stilinskis’ walls and carpet, until the white food cartons seemed to glow. Even Steve didn’t find that a particularly engaging sight — yet everyone was looking at the table instead of each other.

“Why don’t you boys get started filling us in?” Steve suggested, taking a seat on Melissa’s other side from Lydia on the sofa and reaching for the plates.

"Okay, so, um…” Stiles glanced between Steve and his father, taking the plate from Steve with his good hand. “Remember the night Laura Hale died? Out in the Nature Preserve?"

"Let me guess," John drawled. "Scott _was_ there, and that was when he was bitten by a werewolf?"

Stiles scowled at his father. "Do you want to hear the story or not?"

Steve and Melissa facepalmed in unison. Across from them, Erica snickered.

“Well, _anyway_ ,” Stiles continued.

“That’s when I was Bitten,” Scott reiterated, his hand much steadier when he took the plate from Steve — despite his shaking voice. “We didn’t know it yet,” Scott continued. “But I was Bitten by Peter-”

“How did you _not_ know who it was?” Isaac scoffed, snorting in disbelief.

“He could transform completely,” Scott defended. “Into this big, monster-wolf thing.” He paused, staring sightlessly into the carton of steamed vegetables Stiles just handed him. “Kinda looked like a gorilla, actually, mixed with a wolf.” He shrugged, shoulders stiff as boards. “I stumbled across the other half of Laura’s body, and that’s when he pounced. I didn’t know what it was at the time, I thought it was just like a giant, mutant dog or something.”

“Which is _why_ you’re not supposed to be out there at night,” John grumbled.

“In our defense,” Stiles said, fork nearly flying off his plate before he remembered he was holding it. “It’s not like we knew werewolves were _real_.”

“Wait,” Boyd said, gaze snapping up from where his hand paused over a carton of what Steve was pretty sure was one of the beef dishes. “You didn’t know about werewolves before you were bitten?”

“…no?” Scott said, looking about as confused as Steve felt.

“So you didn’t ask for the bite?” Boyd pressed.

“No!” Scott said, now sounded offended. “Why would I want to?!”

“Uh, why wouldn’t you?” Isaac asked.

Erica narrowed her eyes. “So you didn’t agree to the bite, either?”

“Again, why would I?” Scott asked, hunching over the empty plate in his lap.

“We’re faster, stronger, we can see and hear better,” Isaac started, counting off on his fingers. “We-”

“Can’t even see the world in full color, have this monster inside of us that we have to control 24/7 because if we don’t then we hurt or kill people, everyone we love is in danger from us, and we lose our minds on the full moon,” Scott said. “Do you get how easy it is for us to hurt people? We don’t even have to be _trying_ to, we just lose control-”

“No we _don’t_!” Hale snapped. “We’re not monsters, Scott-”

“And yet look at what happens to us every full moon!” Scott cried out, fists thumping against his thighs. Next to Steve, Melissa flinched as the cutlery clinking against the ceramic.

“It takes time, but I don’t turn into a monster, and you seem to have a pretty strong grip on yourself,” Hale started.

“Yeah, a _grip_ ,” Scott snapped. “I can’t just be myself, I have to stay constantly on guard to make sure I don’t turn into a monster!”

“We’re not _monsters_!” Derek snarled, eyes starting to glimmer red.

“ _Boys!_ ”

Hale and Scott both started at Melissa’s sharp reprimand, before slumping back in their seats under her glare.

Erica turned to Hale.

“You only said that he was bitten by the last alpha,” she started.

“Yes…?” Hale said. Now _he_ sounded confused.

“You never said he was bitten unwillingly!” she cried out.

Despite all the bodies packed together, her pronouncement seemed to almost echo in the living room.

Until Isaac, brow furrowing, asked, “So?”

Erica’s head snapped to face him, then to Hale, looking back and forth before shaking her head in resignation.

“Why am I not surprised?” Lydia drawled. Erica looked over at her, and Lydia said simply, “ _Boys._ ”

“Hey, don’t lump me into this,” Boyd protested. “I’m wondering why that part was left out, too.”

“Why does it _matter_?” Hale demanded.

Erica and Boyd stared at him, and Isaac opened his mouth, looked down at his hands, then closed it with a wince.

“Are you _serious_ right now?!” Erica demanded.

“No one chooses what species they’re born as,” Hale said. “Why the hell does it matter when they change-”

“I never wanted this!” Scott cried out. “I never wanted _any_ of this, I never asked for it, and you told me there was a cure-”

“I told you there _might_ be one, and I also told you it might’ve been a myth,” Hale snapped.

“Yeah, when your entire _existence_ is a myth,” Stiles cut-in, spearing a piece of chicken on his fork and pointing it at Hale in accusation.

“I said I didn’t know for sure-”

“Not like it mattered since you killed Peter anyway,” Stiles grumbled.

“Hold on, _what?!_ ” John cried out, almost dropping a carton of…something. “What do you mean — then who was that last night?”

“…Peter,” Derek said. “I don’t know how-”

“Lydia said it was her fault,” Isaac cut in.

As one, the entire room turned to the red head, who clutched at her purse in her lap.

“It’s…complicated,” she said. “It started a bit after I was attacked at the Winter Formal-”

“Hold on!” Melissa cried out, giving her a reassuring look while cutting her off. “Let’s try to stick roughly in chronological order, because I’m already lost and we’re just getting started.” She looked back at her son. “So you were bitten by a wild animal in the middle of the night — which you never told me about.”

Scott winced. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I was going to tell you if it got infected or something, except the next day…well…”

The next day and the few days after, the boys figured out what was happening to Scott, broke into the morgue so Scott could get the _scent_ of the half of Hale’s sister’s body the police had already found, and used that to find the _other_ half of her body on the Hale property.

“And then accused _me_ of murdering her,” Hale added darkly.

Now Stiles winced. “Look, you can’t deny the whole situation was super sketchy.”

“You tracked her _scent_?” Steve asked. Scott nodded. “How strong is your sense of smell?”

“You really don’t wanna know,” Scott said, grimacing. “ _I_ wish I didn’t know.”

Steve looked at the werewolves. “All of you have that kind of sense of smell?”

“You had eggs for breakfast,” Boyd deadpanned.

“ _Any_ way,” Stiles said, side-eying the other werewolves. “The part we left out is that she wasn’t human when we found her. We found half a wolf, under a spiral of wolfsbane rope, and when we removed that…she was back to being half a person.”

Scott grimaced, and everyone looked to Hale.

“It was a tradition,” he said gruffly. “If you can’t cremate a werewolf, that’s the next best thing.”

“Wait,” Steve cut in again. “You can turn into actual wolves!?”

Even Hulk was still mostly human. Or at least kinda human-shaped.

“…eventually,” Hale answered, shifting his gaze away. “It takes time. It can take a lot of time.”

“How long did it take you?” Stiles asked, looking excited about the prospect. Scott just looked nauseous.

Hale didn’t answer.

“…oh,” Boyd said, blinking.

Isaac frowned in confusion. “What-” Erica elbowed him in the side, and he subsided.

Steve wondered what he missed. He wanted to press the issue, but Hale crossed his arms, clearly uninterested in elaborating. So Steve looked to Scott and Stiles, and gave them an encouraging nod to continue.

Scott swallowed. “A bit after Derek was found innocent of Laura’s murder…” He took a bracing breath. “I was _there_ for the bus driver’s murder.”

John paled, and Steve wondered what the murder scene must’ve looked like for that kind of reaction.

“You…what?” John asked.

Scott glared at Hale. “Apparently, alphas can mind control us-”

“No we-” Hale clenched his fist and his jaw, and Steve worried he was going to crack the plate. “You said it yourself, you _fought_ the alpha-”

“Yeah, _that_ night!” Scott snapped. “Didn’t work out so well when we-” Scott waved an empty fork at him, Lydia, and Stiles. “-All got stuck at the school and the alpha nearly got me to kill my friends!”

“Hold up,” Boyd said, turning to Hale. “You can do that to us?”

Hale shook his head — even as Scott nodded.

“You just said ‘nearly’,” Hale started.

“Yeah,” Scott said. “I had to fight him, and I had to fight _hard_.”

“That’s not supposed to happen!” Hale insisted. “One alpha abusing their power-”

“ _Hey!_ ” Steve commanded. He waited a moment, until everyone was quiet and looking at him, then tried to level his voice as much as possible. “Let’s get back to what happened, in the order it happened.” He turned to Scott and Stiles. “What about a dead bus driver?”

The bus driver turned out to be a former insurance investigator, who’d helped cover-up the Hale House arson. Scott looked about ready to throw-up as he described the mysterious monster trying to psychically coerce him into murder.

When John described the scene as the police found it, even Steve winced.

He also made a mental note to get Clint in touch with Scott. Whatever his monster did paled in comparison to Loki, but at least Clint would have a better understanding of mind-control than Steve did.

John rubbed his forehead, stress lines already forming as he looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.

“Keep going,” Steve ordered the boys.

“Right, so, a bit after that, Derek was shot,” Stiles said, with a shrug. “So we had to — wait, did we explain the Argents yet?”

The boys explained how they found out the Argent family were werewolf hunters — Scott got shot with a _crossbow_?! — before going on to describe stealing a bullet from, for its wolfsbane.

“Burning it in the bullet wound counteracts the aconite poisoning” Stiles added, glancing at Hale — no, glancing at his arm. Was that where he was shot? “And it mostly heals the wound.”

Steve wondered what Sitwell’s face would’ve looked like if Stiles had tried to explain _that_ to him, this morning.

“…that would…” Steve shook his head. “That would really not work on me.”

Stiles shrugged. “Honestly, I’m still not sure how it works on werewolves, either. All I know is they heal faster than you-”

Across from Steve, Isaac coughed on what looked like shrimp. Erica thumped him on the back.

“W’eal…we…” Erica thumped him on the back as he coughed up the shrimp he’d choked on. “We heal faster than Captain America?!” Isaac cried out, still rubbing at his throat as he looked between Stiles and Steve in awe.

“Mostly?” Stiles said. “I haven’t, like, clocked it or anything, but based on Steve’s literal war stories and what I saw…yeah, you guys generally heal faster than him.” He narrowed his eyes at Hale, and reiterated, “Most of the time.”

Not ‘all the time’, because when alphas inflicted wounds on other werewolves, it took longer to heal.

As Scott had learned the hard way — from _Hale_.

Melissa shook in the seat next to Steve, so he pressed his knee to hers to try and anchor her in the present — and keep her from attacking Hale then and there.

“That was how we-” Scott gestured at himself, Stiles, and Lydia again. “And Jackson and Allison got trapped in the school overnight.”

“Is that why you locked us in the classroom?” Lydia demanded. Steve stared back and forth between them.

Scott winced. “I was…” He slumped. “The alpha was strong, _really_ strong…and I wasn’t winning. But I still managed to fight back. And most of us came out of that alive — all of us, we learned later.”

“What do you mean, you learned later?”

“Well, the only reason _we_ were there in the first place,” Stiles said. “Was because Derek had kidnapped Scott’s boss because he thought he was the alpha.”

Steve frowned, and looked at Scott. “I thought you worked at a vet clinic?”

“I do,” Scott said. “And apparently Dr. Deaton does magic or something? He taught Stiles that trick with the mountain ash.”

“We didn’t really know much until later,” Stiles answered, waving his fork to dismiss it. “But yeah, that’s why we were all there. And once the alpha _did_ show up, he basically speared Derek on his claws.”

“I didn’t think there was any way that anyone could survive that,” Scott muttered.

“Except you,” Stiles added, pointing his fork at Steve. “Given some of the stuff you said about Nazi bayonets, I figured you probably could’ve survived that…and if _you_ could’ve survived that, then a werewolf definitely could.”

Hale was unimpressed by Stiles’ frame of reference — and said so, along with a few other things that Steve could not for the life of him understand the breadth of. To Steve’s sides, John and Melissa’s expressions darkened as it started to sink in just how _much_ of the boys’ lives they’d been missing over the last few months. Even Steve wanted to kick himself for missing all this — and he’d been three-thousand miles away.

Then again, it turned out even he wasn’t completely disconnected from this.

Steve narrowed his eyes when Stiles described them confronting the monster — who turned out to be Hale’s uncle — at the long-term care unit at the hospital.

“That attack at hospital,” Steve said, measuring out his words as the pieces came together. “The one your father and I worried might’ve been some kind of attempted kidnapping case…that wasn’t about you at all, was it?”

Stiles swallowed, and slowly shook his head.

Hale snorted in dark humor. When everyone looked at him, he jerked his chin pointedly at Steve. “I was wondering why a little brawl would warrant _SHIELD_ agents.”

Steve winced as Hale put together a few pieces of his own, and Stiles counteracted — even as he marveled at how far Stiles’ half-truths and misdirections had gotten him over the last several months.

Still, they were getting off-track, and Steve wasn’t the only one who thought so.

Isaac cut off Stiles’ ramblings to demand, “No one cares about SHIELD, Stiles — what the hell happened with the alpha?”

Stiles rolled his eyes, and Scott grimaced as he explained getting cornered in the locker room — and even Steve found this ridiculous. Weren’t schools all kinds of crazy about security in the 21st century? How did no one notice two adult men breaking into a locker room and cornering a teenager in the shower?

“Werewolves can use their claws to…make other werewolves experience their memories, I guess? I’m still not sure how it works.” Scott shuddered, yet still glanced sidelong at his mother. Steve wondered what else happened that night that Scott wasn’t sharing. “Peter…his memory of the Hale house fire…he made me live it.” Scott swallowed. “It hurt. A lot.”

Isaac narrowed his eyes. “You’ve been shot and stabbed multiple times, and a few claw pricks to the neck are what ‘hurt’?”

Melissa flinched at the casual description of what her son had been through.

“…it was like he was _in me_ ,” Scott mumbled, voice thick like he was speaking around a lump in his throat.

“In your head?” Lydia offered with empathy. “And the only way to get him out was to do what he wanted?” She and Scott shared a look, and Steve wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to know what it meant.

Hale clenched his jaw, but thankfully didn’t interrupt as the boys kept explaining their version of what happened.

Not even when Scott described how, in the process of trying to convince Jackson Whittemore to stay away from the supernatural, they were ambushed by Hunters, and Hale got captured.

By Kate Argent — the woman who’d murdered his family by burning them alive.

“I’m sorry,” Steve offered to Hale.

Hale blinked in surprise, taken aback. “For what?”

“I…read about her,” Steve said, trying to picture the scrap of _Beacon Bugle_ he’d read in passing not too long ago. “If I hadn’t gotten up close and personal with so much worse, I would never believe anyone capable of those things.”

“Up close and personal with ‘worse’?” Isaac asked, looking between Steve and Hale.

Boyd rolled his eyes, and Erica explained, “He fought in World War II, dumbass. He’s talking about concentration camps.”

Steve nodded at Hale. “I know a thing or two about being held captive by sadists who like to kill other people just for existing. Nazis don’t have a monopoly on evil.”

“Wait,” Stiles said suddenly, looking at Hale. “Did _you_ tell her about Scott?”

“ _NO!_ ” Hale roared, snapping up straight in his seat. All three of his teenagers jerked away from him at the vehemence of his outcry. Isaac awkwardly tried to pick up some stray grains of rice from the floor as Hale continued, “I didn’t tell her _anything_. Unlike _some_ people-” He glared at Scott. “I don’t cooperate with people who want me and my entire kind dead.”

Scott growled, an inhuman sound from low in his throat, a sound that made Steve wish he had his shield with him.

The boy only subsided when Melissa flinched, whimpering as she stared at him in fear.

Hale looked between them, but didn’t seem to care as he turned to the rest of them and explained, “I didn’t tell her anything. But she put a few pieces together anyway.”

He took a deep breath, and slumped back into the couch. Boyd leaned into his shoulder, and Hale leaned back.

Despite the support from the teenager at his side, Hale tensed more and more as Stiles continued this crazy tale, explaining the lead up to Kate Argent and Peter Hale’s deaths on the night of the kids’ Winter Formal. Lydia could’ve been made out of marble, she was so still as Stiles explained Peter mauling her and threatening her life for Stiles’ compliance.

“…and he only let me make a phone call,” Stiles added, voice dropping a little as he looked at Lydia, shoulders slumping for the first time in this entire conversation. “I’m…I’m sorry. I didn’t want to leave you there, but he made me”

No wonder — that was where the photograph of her came from, the one that Steve had shown Bruce and Tony a few days later.

Hale remained equally frozen as Scott explained the process of finding him, and then how the two of them were hunted down by Kate and-

“Are you _kidding me_ , right now!?” Isaac cried out, knocking into Erica, who growled at Isaac nearly upending her plate. Isaac ignored her. “You were going on about how Allison was working with you guys and you’re telling me she tried to kill you, too-”

“No, she didn’t!” Scott defended. “That’s the point I’m trying to make-”

“You _just_ said she shot you,” Boyd pointed out.

Not that it mattered much, once the alpha found them.

Allison had nothing to do with the murder of Hale family, but Peter Hale made her watch as he literally ripped Kate’s throat out with his claws.

The child soldier Steve had seen last night, shooting at the werewolves with an aplomb and focus Steve hadn’t seen since World War II, made a lot more sense.

What little sense of order Steve got from the story, was quickly lost as Stiles explained how he and Jackson had gotten there and attacked the monstrous alpha werewolf with-

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, setting his plate down on the coffee table so he could turn his whole body to Stiles and ask, “Did you just say you used a _self-igniting Molotov_?”

Scott, Stiles, and Lydia all winced.

“When we’d been trapped in the school by the animal — uh, I guess Peter? — I made some, since we didn’t have any weapons,” Lydia explained. Steve stared at her, starting to see why this high school student could pique Bruce’s academic interest. “We made two, to be exact…” She looked at Scott. “I don’t know why the one I gave you didn’t work.”

“You had _Jackson_ helping you,” Stiles grumbled. At everyone’s looks, he added, “Well the second one worked like a charm. That, plus the Argent firepower, brought Peter down long enough for Derek to kill him and become the new alpha.”

“You _killed_ …” John stared at Hale, who stared right back with a tight jaw and unwavering gaze. Hale’s eyes flashed a bright, vibrant red, and John flinched. Even from nearly two feet away, Steve could feel the tension, but John pressed on, “Then who was that with us last night?”

“…Peter,” Hale answered. “He came back to life…” He jerked his chin toward Lydia. “Because of her.”

“You said it was complicated?” Steve asked, trying to nudge the conversation back on course.

Steve already remembered Stiles’ descriptions of the psychotic break she’d suffered, running away from the hospital in the middle of a shower — and showing up in the woods three days later, just as naked and with no memory of where she’d been or what happened to her. That’d been half the reason for Bruce sending her an annotated copy of his old article.

Still, his blood chilled as she described a semester of hallucinations and nightmares and psychic exploitation.

Even worse, though, was the implication that no one else had noticed what was happening to her. Scott and Stiles looked down at their plates in steadfast shame, but the one time Stiles tried to interrupt her to apologize, she cut him off with a sharp sweep of her manicured hand.

Her voice grew thicker and thicker. Steve was all too familiar with suppressing tears and the sensation of talking around a lump in one’s throat, and wished he had some water to offer her.

Lydia laid out her hazy memories of a ritual she barely remembered doing, something involving mirrors and moonlight and a particular kind of wolfsbane crushed into yet _more_ magic dust.

Why was magic so dusty?

“The last thing I remember is putting Peter’s body’s claws into Derek and getting the full moon on him with the mirrors and…” 

She trailed off, eyes shining, but no tears falling

“He came back,” Hale finished.

All the rest of the teenagers were staring at her in bewilderment. Isaac, Erica, and Stiles were paler than plates they held, Boyd looked furious on her behalf, and Scott looked ready to cry with her.

Melissa looked ready to murder Peter Hale (again?) herself.

Steve looked to the boys. “And you two…knew nothing about this?”

Stiles tore his gaze away from her, and shook his head.

John took a deep breath, then another. Steve wondered if he should give John his whiskey back, after this.

“So tell us what _you_ were doing, then,” John said.

“That’s when the Argents called in the big guns,” Stiles said. “Gerard.”

Melissa narrowed his eyes. “Was this when you saw him _cut someone in half_?”

Scott tried to answer, but just swallowed and nodded, blinking away tears before they could fall down his cheeks.

Even Steve had never seen someone actually cut in half, during the war.

Despite the two serial killers having died, bodies continued to drop. Meanwhile, Hale started biting people, specifically-

“Why teenagers?” John demanded. “Why not adults?”

“Because teenagers have the highest chance of surviving the Bite,” Hale said. “And they usually need packs the most-”

“What do you mean, ‘survive the Bite’?” Steve asked.

Hale looked down at his lap, and Boyd answered, “It kills people, sometimes.”

Everyone looked at him. Next to him, Erica added, “It’s a risk, a big one, but one which we all took, anyway.”

“ _Why?!_ ” Scott cried out.

“…you’re sitting the same room as Captain America and you have to ask me ‘why’?” Erica asked.

Erica had had severe epilepsy, and turning into a werewolf had effectively cured her; Boyd wanted a pack, for reasons he refused to elaborate on; and Isaac’s father was abusive and getting worse…so Isaac wanted the lycanthropic ability to heal.

Steve wanted to throw up when Isaac explained just what his father was doing, that Isaac needed to heal _from_.

“How did you even _find_ them?” Steve asked Hale, as Melissa and John both set aside their plates. He didn’t think any of them would be able to stomach anymore food after all this.

And the kids still had several months more to explain to them.

“Like I said,” Hale reiterated. “Teenagers and young adults are most receptive to the Bite,” Hale explained. “I followed some around, found and Bit Isaac first. He suggested Erica, and both of them suggested Boyd.”

“Basically,” Scott sneered — wait, _Scott_ sneered?! “You found the easiest targets-”

“I found the people who needed a pack the most,” Hale threw right back at him. Steve jerked back a little when Hale’s eyes started _glowing red_ — and his eyebrows rose when Scott’s flashed gold.

“Yeah, because you just needed good little soldiers for _your_ stupid war,” Stiles cut in, eyes remaining mercifully human — though one was still darkened by bruising. “So you picked the most vulnerable kids at our school.”

“Ex _cuse_ you?” Erica demanded, and now _her_ eyes were flashing gold. Steve missed the days when the only eye-color change he had to worry about was Bruce’s turning green. “Just because you’re jealous that you never got to be a werewolf-”

“Oh, I had the chance,” Stiles said, almost standing up except for the plate in his lap. “Peter offered. I turned him down.”

Hale opened his mouth, eyes practically burning red — but he stilled when Boyd placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.

Boyd then turned and looked at Scott. “Look, I didn’t know you were forced to change — and you know what? I’m sorry you went through that. I’m sure it sucked. But just because you had _your_ choice taken away from _you_ , doesn’t mean you get to take _mine_ away from _me_ by claiming I was somehow tricked into it.”

“You really want to tell me you weren’t?” Stiles said. “You said it yourself, Derek was an idiot who was desperate for help-”

“He missed a few things when explaining all this,” Boyd cut him off. He glanced sidelong at Hale, whose eyes faded back to regretful hazel. “And a lot of those were things I would’ve liked to have known then, too…” Boyd’s expression hardened, and now _his_ eyes burned gold, as he directed his gaze at Scott. “But it was still my choice, and Derek’s still my alpha.”

Beside him, Erica and Isaac echoed Boyd’s sentiments. With the three teenagers’ support, Hale looked at Scott.

“I tried to be a good alpha for you, I tried to help,” Hale said.

“You called that _helping_?” Scott said. “You stalked me, lied to me, threatened me, beat the crap out of me-”

“We were _pack_ whether you liked it or not,” Hale continued, ignoring Scott’s words.

"So, what, just being pack meant we were supposed to trust each other? Unconditionally?"

"Yes!" Hale cried out. "Being a pack is like being a family-"

"And what, just being _family_ means you're supposed to trust each other unconditionally?" Scott demanded.

Hale stared at him, bewildered. "You- of course it does, what the hell do you think being a family _is_?"

"Tell that to..." Stiles started.

But then he stopped.

Everyone turned to look at him, as he was looking around at everyone else, pausing and turning like he was counting everyone off. "Well, shit."

"What?" John asked.

Stiles pinched the bridge of your nose. "Derek, would I be correct in assuming both your parents were loving and supportive people?"

Now Hale stared at Stiles like he was an idiot. "That's what being a parent means, Stiles."

"...not always," Isaac said.

Stiles facepalmed, then looked to Scott. "Remember what you said about Hale picking the most vulnerable kids to make werewolves out of? Lydia, Erica and Boyd's parents just ignore them. That, plus Isaac’s dad…"

Scott slowly looked around the room, then back at Hale.

"...oh."

"'Oh'?” Hale demanded. “What 'oh'?!"

If what Stiles just said about all the teenagers’ families was true…and given what Steve knew about John’s father and Melissa’s ex-husband…

"Hale, if I'm understanding Stiles correctly,” he explained, trying to keep his voice as even as soothing as possible. “You, Lydia, Erica, and Boyd are the only people in the room who've never been hurt by one of your parents. And _you_ are the only one who's never been hurt nor neglected by them." He paused, then added, "Well, possibly excepting Melissa-"

"No, not excepting me," she said coolly, leaning back. "There's a reason Scott and I haven't seen the rest of our family in years."

Steve nodded. “Right, so…it looks like you grew up with a very different understanding of a family from the rest of us.”

“Wait,” Erica said. “You’re in the room-”

“And my dad was an unkind father, too,” Steve dismissed, with a sharp wave of his hand. Today wasn’t about him, and Joseph Rogers was eighty years dead.

Stiles snorted. "So what?” he said, looking at Scott. “This still makes Derek a grade A dick-"

"But it explains a lot," Scott murmured.

Stiles turned to stare at him in bewilderment, before his face fell. "Oh, no no no, no, Scott, do not go easy on him, do you not remember anything he did over the past few months?"

Scott gripped the seat of the chair he was sitting on.

"Why does it matter?" Hale demanded.

"Because," Steve interjected, leaning forward. "You're the only person in the room who grew up trusting your parents, without ever worrying about not being able to. It didn't even occur to you that even if Scott _did_ see you like a family, he still wouldn't trust you — did it?"

"That's what families do," Hale said, now looking confused. “Pack, family-”

"That's what they're supposed to do," Steve corrected. Around them, everyone gave Hale pitying looks. "But they often don't."

“Based on everyone this room,” Lydia chimed in, her calculating gaze going around the people in the room. “You could argue they _usually_ don’t.”

Watching Hale's face fall was almost like watching him age backwards, the way his anger drifted into confusion, into realization, into sadness. His disbelief as he looked around the room was staggering.

He reminded Steve of the moment Bucky realized where Steve and his ma were getting their bruises from.

“I think,” Steve said, drawing out his words with care. “We’ve gotten a little off-track.”

Hale slumped back in his seat, his anger vanished like dust in the wind. Hale’s eyes shone — not flickering red with supernatural power, but in the afternoon sunlight, as if tears were on the verge of welling up.

Then Steve blinked, and Hale’s eyes were as dry as before.

“Right,” Stiles said, leaning away from the couch Hale sat on. “Okay, so, bodies — human bodies — started dropping, Derek went on his Biting spree and got his new pack, and the Argents were getting unhinged, except for Allison since she was _helping us_.” Stiles’ leg bounced in place, almost in danger of knocking over a carton of rice by his knee. “I knew there was a lizard-thing thing doing the killing because I was there when the next victim died. But we didn’t have any clue what it was until an altercation at the pool, and Derek figured it out there.”

Here, they all looked at Hale, who _still_ looked shocked at all the broken families in the room.

When Bucky had figured out what was happening in the Rogers home, he’d damn near gone to confront Steve’s father directly, ready to return every bruise he’d seen on Steve and his ma tenfold.

It was one of the only times in their lives Steve had needed to hold Bucky back from a fight, instead of the other way around.

Here and now, Boyd tapped his knee against Hale’s, knocking the man out of his daze.

Hale took a shaky breath, and answered the unspoken question. “There was, uh…a moment. The creature saw its reflection and was confused, and that’s what clued me in. I heard stories about them when I was a kid — it’s one of the things that could happen when a Bite went wrong. A kanima.” Hale seemed to be far away, his gaze far beyond the crowded living room. “It’s our lizard brain made manifest; the basest, reptilian part of our natures we all — humans, werewolves, everyone — have deep inside us.”

That description sounded like it belonged in a fairytale.

Then again, so did half the people in the room. Given Steve belonged in a comic book, he supposed he shouldn’t judge. “And then what?” he asked.

"So, uh, it turned out Gerard _had_ figured out that I was a werewolf, after all," Scott continued, fork clattering on his plate as he set it aside.

"And you know this because...?" Melissa asked.

"He said as much," Scott said, with a shrug.

Immediately, Derek and Isaac's heads snapped up to Scott, while Boyd and Erica narrowed their eyes at him.

"You just lied," Hale said, gaze flicking between Scott’s face and chest — his _heart_. "Why?"

"I'm not lying," Scott insisted, glancing sidelong before focusing back on the werewolves. "Just — skipping over some unnecessary details."

"If they're so unnecessary," Isaac said, his expression starting to match Boyd's, fingers curling around his knee like his claws were about to come out. "Then why do you smell anxious?"

"And why do you keep looking at your mother?" Steve added.

Melissa stilled, and Scott scowled at them. "Because when I was picking up my mom from work, Gerard showed up and _stabbed_ me and threatened her."

For a moment, no one said anything, the room filled with nothing but half a dozen shaky breaths or choked-off gasps.

The silence made Melissa's quiet whimper all the more thunderous in the silence.

"Mom," Scott tried to insist, opening his eyes and turning to face her directly. "It's okay-"

"Stop _saying_ that!" she snapped.

Everyone sat there in awkward silence as Scott tried to downplay his torture in his attempt to sooth her.

And it was torture. The man had apparently stabbed Scott and _twisted_ the knife in his gut — and apparently at Melissa’s workplace, too.

Goddamnit, they were all kids.

"My son was stabbed and threatened by a psychopath less than a dozen yards in front of me,” Melissa said, tears cutting down her cheeks. “And I. Didn't. Notice!"

Going by the look on her face, Steve wondered if he’d done Gerard a favor by shooting him in the head, last night.

“Let’s get back to explaining what happened,” Steve said, draping a firm hand on Melissa’s shoulder.

He kept his hand there to reassure her, because the next thing Scott explained was how he and Allison were attacked by the mysterious lizard monster during the full moon, when she'd been guarding him as he locked himself in-

Scott looked guiltily at Isaac. “Your ice-box.”

Boyd sucked in a sharp breath, as everyone else in the room stilled in shock — save for Melissa and Lydia, who looked as confused as Steve felt.

“Ice-box?” Lydia asked, before Steve could. “What ice-box?”

John’s eyes fell shut and he brought a shaking hand up to his face.

Isaac clenched his jaw. “In my basement — my dad used to lock me in an ice chest overnight when beating the shit out of me wasn’t enough.”

…oh god.

Steve’s father had been horrific, but even he’d never tried imprisoning him or Ma, especially not somewhere so tiny — and Isaac was much taller than Steve had ever been before Rebirth.

Though it turned out to have been the kinder option, because the other three werewolves had spent their full moon in spiked chains.

“…you’re kidding,” John begged of Hale’s pack. “Right?”

All three teenagers shook their heads in eerie unison.

Steve was grateful he’d set his plate on the coffee table, so he could balance his elbows on his knees as he buried his face in his hands.

“ _God_ ,” he muttered. Teenagers getting imprisoned and _tortured_ — hadn’t he left this crap behind in his war?

No wonder Stiles had looked so exhausted in D.C.

“A bit after that, I noticed them-” Scott looked at Isaac and Erica. “-dragging Jackson off somewhere…but he was fine when he came back.”

The teenagers all looked at each other, but Hale explained, “We’d gotten some of the kanima’s venom. I figured the kanima would be immune to their own venom, so we tested it on Jackson. It paralyzed him.”

“And when, exactly, was this?” John asked.

“The day of the banquet,” Stiles answered.

“Banquet?” Erica asked. “What banquet?”

“Uh, did you ever hear about the Avengers making a surprise visit to a charity dinner?” Stiles asked. Erica nodded, though the rest of her pack shook their heads. “Yeah, that’s what we were there for.”

Erica’s eyes went wide, while Hale’s narrowed.

“When you called me, asking about Lydia, you said you were…” Hale shut his eyes, as if trying to recall something. “Staying with ‘your uncle’s rich friend in the middle of the Chitauri zone’…” Hale looked at John, then Steve, then back at Stiles. “You were calling me from Stark Tower, weren’t you?”

Stiled curled over his jittery legs in sheepishness. “…yes.”

Steve frowned — they’d been so busy during the visit to Tony’s, when the hell had Stiles been calling Hale?

“But that’s seriously not relevant or important,” Stiles deflected, looking at Scott to take it away.

Scott obliged.

After Steve’s clusterfuck mission in “Iraq”, one of the first messages he’d returned home to was about an attempted break-in at the McCall's house.

To not even Steve’s surprise, Scott and his friends hadn't scared off a pair of robbers — they'd scared off Erica and Isaac.

Who'd been there for Lydia.

“…you tried to kill me,” she confirmed, voice hoarse as she looked at the werewolves across from her. Hale stayed frozen in his seat, his shoulders so still that his dark jacket looked like a Hale-shaped hole in the Stilinskis’ old couch. Isaac looked away, ducking his head as his blond curls fell and obscured his eyes. But where he and Boyd looked regretful, Erica sat unrepentant, meeting Lydia’s gaze with her own.

“We thought you were the kanima, and had good reason to believe it,” Hale finally defended. “Peter Bit you, and I Bit Jackson — making both of you my responsibility to take care of…or _take care of_.”

“Great freakin’ job there, buddy,” Stiles said. “Instead of helping anybody, you were just going around ready to kill anybody who inconvenienced you-”

“I think you have me mixed up with his girlfriend’s family,” Hale sneered, pointing a _claw_ at Scott, who scowled right back at him.

“And yet,” Lydia said, voice colder than the ice Steve spent half a century in, her nails tapping against her plate like claws. “You were going to take _my life_ because of your uncle’s fu-”

“I was going to make sure my uncle’s mistake didn’t cost any _more_ lives than it already had,” Hale said, looking her in the eye.

“See, _this_ is why I say we’re monsters!” Scott snapped. “You act as if people dying is just no big deal-”

“You think _I_ think it’s no big deal?” Hale yelled, snapping up to his feet and looming over the boys, fists shaking and eyes shining. Steve tensed, pressing his bare toes into the thin carpet to brace himself for any sharp movement needed to wrestle down an angry werewolf. “You think I don’t _care_ about people’s lives?”

“Why the hell shouldn’t we?” Stiles demanded, when Scott seemed speechless. “You joined your psycho-creep uncle even after he killed your own sister-”

“Because I thought it was an accident-”

“Yeah, an _accident_ that he lost his mind and ripped his own niece to shreds!” Scott shouted. He shot up to his feet, hitting the coffee table and causing the multitude of plates on it to clatter and some empty cartons to topple over. Next to Steve, the ladies froze, while the rest of the room tensed, ready to intervene. Scott didn’t notice as he shoved his face right into Hale’s. “You want to say we’re not monsters, when things like that can happened ‘ _on accident_ ’?!”

“ _HEY!_ ”

At Steve’s shout, Hale and Scott both froze in their face off over the coffee table, breathing heavily. Neither of them looked over at him. Isaac was leaning away from both of them, while Erica looked ready to join them. Boyd kept a steady hand on Hale’s hip, trying to pull him back down into his seat, and Stiles buried his face in his good hand.

Melissa looked like she didn’t even recognize Scott. Steve was sure he’d be more shocked, too, if he hadn’t already been good friends with Bruce.

“Maybe,” John offered, also staring at Scott in bewilderment. “We should leave off here and pick this up another time-”

“So they can tell you what they want, and leave out half the story?” Hale snarled, finally tearing his gaze away from Scott to wave at him and Stiles. “So you can rescind your story to your deputies and to SHIELD because I didn’t keep up my end of the deal? No thanks. I want this over and done with — and with all of us here-” He scowled at Scott. “-So no one can lie anymore.”

“Funny,” Stiles said, leg jittering even as he shot Hale a cold smile that bared his teeth. “We were going to say the same thing-”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Steve said. “Not helping.” Stiles scowled, looking away. Under Steve’s gaze, Hale and Scott backed down, vibrating with tension but at least keeping their asses in their seats. “So the fight at McCall house…?”

Scott and Hale kept glaring at each other. Between them, Stiles clenched his jaw, and kept explaining what happened.

Somehow, in the middle of the Hale pack trying to kill Lydia, Scott and Allison had confirmed the lizard monster — kanima — was actually Jackson. Meanwhile, Allison and Stiles had obtained some kind of guide to the supernatural from her family, a beastiary written in Archaic Latin.

A few translation mishaps later, they figured out the kanima was being controlled by someone else.

“So after Lydia corrected Nat’s translation of this…beastiary,” John started, trying to make sense of this increasingly ridiculous story. Steve wouldn’t have believed a word about a mind-controlled lizard-person if he hadn’t fought the damn thing himself. “You-”

“Hold up a second,” Boyd cut in. “Who’s ‘Nat’ and why would you ask her if you had Lydia?”

“They _didn’t_ ask me, at first,” Lydia reminded them under her breath.

“Is this the same ‘Nat’ you were talking about last night?” Isaac asked, sitting up straight again. “The ex-KGB agent?”

Erica’s eyes widened in realization, and Steve sighed. So much for security.

“Holy shit,” she breathed out, ignoring John’s quiet grumble of ‘ _language!_ ’. “You mean Natasha Romanoff? You got help from the _Black Widow_?!”

The boys winced in perfect unison, and Steve wondered just how many new ones Nat would rip into them once she heard about all this.

“Yeah, look, she helps me with my Latin homework, and helps Scott with becoming an Instagram ninja and stuff,” Stiles dismissed. “Back to the important stuff-”

“ _Natasha Romanoff_ helps you with your homework,” Erica said, leaning toward Stiles with intrigue-brightened eyes. “And you think that’s not important?”

“It’s sure as hell not relevant!” Stiles snapped.

“And what does she help _you_ with?” Erica demanded, looking at Scott as he hunched into his seat, chair almost squeaking under the shift in weight.

“…just some gymnastics and parkour stuff,” he admitted. “But she’s also helped me and Allison with our sparring technique, and teaching me some random stuff like defensive driving and Russian and-”

“Konechno ty sdelal,” Hale muttered, a voice full of bitterness as he glared at Scott, and not seeming to notice everyone else staring at _him_. “Eto ob'yasnyayet tak mnogo.”

For a moment, even meager human hearing could’ve caught the sound of a pin dropping on the carpet.

“…You speak Russian?” Boyd finally asked, shoulders slumped in disbelief.

Hale just rolled his eyes.

“Wait, else do you speak?” Boyd continued. The teenagers on the couch looked just as surprised as everyone else in the room — but unlike everyone else, they also looked eager to learn more.

How little did Hale tell them about himself?

“English and Spanish,” Hale answered, though only addressing his pack. “Less fluent in Russian, Japanese, and French.”

Erica’s eyes went wide again, though this time she looked indignant. “¡Por qué no me dijiste?” she cried out.

“Pregúntaste nunca,” Hale drawled.

“Hijueputa!” Erica snarled. “Tu-”

“¡No digas palabrotas!” Melissa cut in, glaring at them both. “Watch your language, whatever language it’s in.”

Steve didn’t understand what they were saying, or why Hale looked _regretful_ of all things. Everyone else in the room looked as bewildered as Steve felt — save for Scott, who warily eyed Erica as she crossed her arms and slumped back in her seat, grumbling under her breath while glaring sidelong toward Hale.

“I really need to brush up,” Steve muttered to himself, before looking at the boys and getting this back on track before this devolved any further. “Okay, so you figured out that the ‘kanima’ wasn’t…alone?”

This turned out to be how the boys had shown up at the gay club John had found them in. Where Steve and John had assumed they’d just been sneaking into a bar underage for fun, in reality they’d tracked down the ‘kanima’ and captured it there.

Which meant it was also when they stole a police prisoner transport van to hold Jackson captive in.

John and Melissa’s faces fell further and further as the boys described stealing the van, getting clothes and food, and trying to text Jackson’s father to keep attention off of them — and how that backfired.

Hale and his betas stayed silent through this explanation. Erica actually looked impressed by the boys’ plan, while Isaac and Boyd just looked nauseous. Hale looked almost vindicated when they got to how Jackson had escaped, and gotten a restraining order against Scott and Stiles.

“Not that it stuck, much,” Stiles grumbled. He looked to his dad. “That ‘explosion’ in the library? Not an explosion. The kanima’s master figured out we were onto them and tried to make a threat. We tried to grab him again a few days later at the rave, but it…didn’t work.”

Hale glared at Scott. “That’s also the night Victoria Argent tried to murder Scott.”

Next to him, Melissa gasped.

“Victoria is…Allison’s mother, right?” Steve asked, trying to remember all the names he’d been deluged with last night.

He heard a choked off protest to his left, and turned to see John staring at Hale, all the blood drained out of his face.

“That was the day before she killed herself,” John explained, not looking away from Hale.

Clenching his teeth, Hale explained, “Hunters have a Code — they would rather die than turn into a werewolf. In the course of fighting Victoria off of Scott, I Bit her.”

Steve was about to ask a million and one questions, when Melissa choked out, “ _Why?!_ ”

She wasn’t addressing Hale — but Scott.

Who looked confused.

“Why was she trying to kill you?” Melissa asked again, shoulders trembling.

“Um…” Scott actually _blushed_ of all things. “Pretty sure she figured out me and Allison were still seeing each other. Why…why do you ask?”

She didn’t hear.

Steve nudged his shoulder against hers.

That jolted her out of her horrified daze. She crumbled, bringing her hands up to her face as the tears started to fall.

On the couch across from them, Boyd was the only beta still looking at Melissa, glancing back and forth between her and Scott. Erica was studying her lap, Isaac was looking everywhere but in front of him. Hale leaned forward, hands braced against his knees and hands clasped together as he studied Melissa.

John reached into the food delivery bag and pulled out a napkin with a little panda stamped onto it, which Steve passed to Melissa, who shuddered as she pressed her face into it.

“Mrs. McCall?” Lydia asked, draping a gentle hand over Melissa’s shoulder.

“…I think…” Melissa started, swallowed, and took a deep breath. “I think that this part…is my fault.”

Hale’s head snapped up, and Steve hoped the flicker of red in Hale’s eyes was just his own imagination and a trick of the afternoon sun.

“I figured out Scott’d been lying about Allison,” Melissa said, finally lifting up her head to look at her son. “I had no idea she would — I went to talk to Victoria after I found the empty condom box in your room-”

Isaac whistled, low and impressed, cutting off with a grunt when Boyd reached around Erica to thwack him upside the head.

“Mom, it’s okay,” Scott said. Then he winced as he realized, too late, that it was exactly the wrong thing to say. Hale snorted in dark, bitter humor, and Melissa’s tears started falling again. “I mean — you couldn’t have known!”

“Not like it matters,” Hale ground out. “Allison’s mother is still dead, now, because you just couldn’t keep your hands to yourself, and look where _that_ led.”

John leaned forward, posture matching Hale’s. “And what does that mean? Where did that lead?”

“Allison going off the deep end and joining the rest of her psychotic family’s even more psychotic cause,” Isaac drawled. He and Erica leaned into each other as he added, “How do you think Erica and Boyd ended up in the Argents’ basement? _She put them there._ ”

“Wait,” Steve said. “When? Wasn’t this-”

“Last night,” Stiles cut in, good hand squeezing Scott’s knee, before reaching up to readjust his sling. “Uh, backtracking here: Mrs. Argent killed herself the night of Lydia’s birthday party over a week ago, which was apparently _also_ the night Peter came back from the dead, _and_ when we saw Matt controlling the kanima and knew he was the real killer.” He shrugged his good shoulder. “That night was the full moon.”

“Lydia’s birthday party…” Steve started, before realizing when he’d heard that before.

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “That was the night when you-” He glanced around again, especially at Hale and the other three teenagers, skipping over his dad, then back at Steve — his gaze that little bit harder.

Right.

They’d never actually _talked_ about their fight, that night.

“So that’s when we brought the case to you,” Stiles continued, pointing to the Sheriff, who clenched his jaw as he got to his own part of the story. “And you know most of what happened next-”

“ _We_ don’t,” Boyd cut in, leaning back save for the inexplicable hand on Hale’s shuddering shoulder.

“Derek didn’t come back to our spot after the full moon,” Erica said — addressing all the adults except for the one next to her. “So after Scott and Stiles got us out of the chains, we were looking for his sorry ass-” Hale flinched, but didn’t interrupt. “-and got him to Deaton’s after we found him. They’d told us they knew the kanima master was Matt, but we never heard back from them after that.”

For their sake, Stiles skimmed over the Sheriff taking them to the station for a warrant, only for Matt Dahler to show up, killing all the deputies and holding them hostage to destroy evidence.

Steve, who’d already heard most of this story, scrubbed his hand over his face again. He’d only gotten some glimpses at the photos of the murders, the blood all over the walls of John’s workplace.

John, the boys, and Melissa had had to _live_ through that.

“All of what you saw,” Scott said carefully, finally tearing his gaze away from his mother to look at the Sheriff. “That happened. There were just…some things you missed. Matt had Jackson there with him, as the kanima. Derek showed up for…” He frowned, and looked to Hale. “Why _were_ you there?”

“…I heard from them-” Hale jerked his thumb at the three teenagers at his side. “That you figured out who the kanima master was. I went to try and stop you from dragging the police into this — because look at what happened when you did.”

Scott shut his eyes, and Stiles reared back like he’d been struck.

“It’s not your fault,” Steve said immediately, glaring at Hale — who looked away, hunched over his hands as they clasped between his knees. Steve turned back to the boys. “You found a killer and went to the police, that’s exactly what any reasonable person would do.”

“No,” Hale cut in immediately. “You don’t understand, Captain — there is a _reason_ why we keep human law enforcement out of our matters, and all the funerals the Sheriff is about to be attending is the biggest reason why.”

John flinched, and Steve reached out to clasp a reassuring hand on his knee, his gesture mirroring Stiles.

“We have powers, and Hunters have special training for this,” Hale continued, standing up. But this time, he was calm as he got to his feet — and when he gestured for the other three teenagers to do the same.

Hale turned from his kids, back to the rest of the room. “Those deputies had neither,” he finished. “And now they’re all dead-”

“That’s what we were trying to avoid!” Stiles shouted.

__

_  
_

_Everyone_ in the room jerked back in surprise. Lydia actually whimpered in fear. To Steve’s shock, Stiles didn’t even notice that he’d scared her.

“Matt gets arrested by the police, he tries to use the kanima to break himself out, and _we_ would be ready to capture Jackson!” Stiles continued. “We didn’t think there was any way Matt would make the first move, we didn’t even know that _he_ knew we were onto him!”

“What, and you think that matters?” Hale snapped, rising to his feet in a move fast enough even Steve couldn’t track it. Looming over Stiles, he said, “You got the police involved, and now they’re dead. They’d still be alive if you hadn’t-”

“They’d _all_ still be alive if you hadn’t Bitten Jackson!” Scott snapped, rising to his feet as well. Erica snarled, but Boyd held her by the shoulder, much like he’d been doing for Hale for half the afternoon.

Hale didn’t back down. “I know — but unlike you, when I make a mistake, I own up to it. I was trying to stop him-”

“By killing him!” Scott growled. “You _always_ just try to kill people-”

Melissa and Lydia eased back into the couch, away from the shouting boys. “Fellas,” Steve tried, slowly standing.

Not that any of them noticed.

“Because that’s what it takes!” Hale yelled, waving his arm over the coffee table as if the toppled food cartons were fallen bodies. “Look at how many people Matt killed — you think Jackson’s life is worth all of theirs?”

“You didn’t even know it was Jackson, you kept trying to kill _Lydia_!” Stiles cried out, supporting Scott from his seat.

“Gentlemen,” John also said, assessing their postures with a critical gaze, every inch a cop even off-duty. “Let’s just put a pause on this for a moment and collect our thoughts.”

“All of us have been going at this for a long while,” Steve continued, following John’s lead. “We could use a break.”

“No,” Hale said. He pointed sharply toward the front door, and with an awkward glance at each other and around the room, the trio of teenagers started to shuffle off. “We’re done here. Our part of the story, our part of this entire mess, we told you all of it. I kept up my end of this deal-” He looked to the Sheriff. “And I assume you’ll keep up yours?”

John took a deep breath, and Steve said, “We already have.”

All the other werewolves beside Scott paused, Hale blinking in surprise and the teenagers turning on the spot to face him.

“A SHIELD agent was already by this morning,” Steve continued, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “It’s already taken care of. Your pack will be safe, the LEOs have already been told the most amenable stories possible. We were never going to do otherwise, Hale.”

Hale looked between Steve and the Sheriff, eyes wide and flickering red in anger. But clenching his teeth and his fist, he snarled, “Then we’re done here.”

Hale stomped off, not even looking to see if the three teenagers were following him.

Which meant he didn’t see Erica and Boyd’s unsure gaze, or Isaac hesitating by the couch.

“Where were you going?”

Everyone, even Hale, stopped and turned to Scott. The boy moved, easing around all their seats as he addressed not Hale, but the two teenagers next to him. Scott stood by Isaac and asked Erica and Boyd again, “Yesterday. Isaac said you two were ‘leaving’, but he didn’t say more than that. Before…” Scott winced, took a deep breath, and continued, “Before Allison captured you — where were you going?”

Hale’s anger melted away as quickly as the red from his eyes, and he looked almost stricken as he turned away, shoulder hunched so tight Steve was sure he’d tear through his leather jacket.

Erica and Boyd shared a silent conversation in a single gaze, before Erica took Boyd’s hand in her own to give him a reassuring squeeze as she answered for them both. “Dr. Deaton said there might be some other packs near by. We were hoping to find them.”

Hale flinched.

“We were going to ask them for _help_ ,” Boyd insisted, pulling his hand from Erica’s to reach for Hale — but stopping when Hale stepped away, whirling on the spot to look up at him in disbelief.

Or rather, at Erica — at her heart, and at her face, her eyes and expression falling as she wrapped her arms around herself, turning away in guilt.

“To help me?” Hale asked, looking between his three teenagers. “Or to help _you_?”

“ _I_ hadn’t left,” Isaac defended.

“You went to _him_ ,” Hale snarled, glaring at Scott standing behind Isaac.

“Sure, leave _me_ out of this,” Stiles muttered.

“Because you weren’t _doing_ anything!” Isaac snapped. “You weren’t doing anything, you didn’t know anything, and I didn’t want to go with Erica and Boyd.”

Even Scott seemed bewildered by that, and Steve wondered just which part of this story he was missing. He inched his way forward, trying to situate himself between all the angry werewolves without interfering in their fight.

Though he realized he might still have to interfere after all when Erica looked back up at Hale, her eyes glowing an angry gold.

“We were _scared_ ,” she said. Hale’s gaze was riveted on her. “We didn’t know anything. Don’t get mad at us because when we realized you didn’t know anything, either, we went looking for someone who did.”

“Or someone who at least admitted when they didn’t know shit,” Isaac chimed in, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Scott.

With a frustrated growl, Boyd looked at Hale and said, “We’re here _now_ , Derek. Don’t forget that.”

Hale seemed to have forgotten how to _speak_. Still, he nodded, and with a shark and instructive jerk of his head, he turned toward the front door again.

Erica and Boyd followed.

Isaac…didn’t.

Hale looked back at him once, and only once.

When Isaac hesitated — even in the face of Erica’s wide eyes and Boyd’s murmur of something Steve couldn’t hear — Hale turned away.

Isaac flinched at Boyd’s disappointed head-shake, but still he didn’t move as Erica and Boyd stepped around Hale, the werewolves all yanking on their shoes and-

“Where’s Peter?”

They all looked at Lydia as she knelt up on the couch.

“You know,” she continued, focusing on Hale, who didn’t look up from pulling on his boots. “That psychopath who’s been using and abusing you and me and Scott?”

Hale stood up.

“Do you not know?” Scott asked. “Or do you just not care?”

Instead of answering, Hale ushered out Erica and Boyd, and slammed the door shut behind them.

Steve and Scott were the only one who didn’t flinched, and some of the pictures on the wall actually shook from the force of it.

Isaac stood planted by the couch, gaze fixed on the door his pack just left through.

Lydia swore, and Melissa was too frozen to tell her off for it. Even John let the language slide as he stood up and crouched in front of Melissa, trying to coax some acknowledgment from her.

“That…could’ve gone better,” Steve said.

Scott collapsed onto the couch, burying his face in his hands.

“I know, buddy,” Stiles said. “Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, like I said, this scene is already being deleted, but if you wanna share thoughts and concrit anyway, I would still appreciate it. You learn as much from your failures as your successes, if not more, and while I don't oblige by everything, I have made significant changes to Winter Wolves before based on concrit from you all as readers. :)


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